If Anne were here, she’d accuse Amelia of invading my privacy, her voice terrifyingly calm as she threatened Amelia with some kind of legal action: That American girl had no right to enter my room, no right to remove my covers, no right to expose my broken body.
“Why did your family keep it a secret?” Amelia asks. She doesn’t have to explain what she’s talking about.
Anne said concealing the extent of my injuries was necessary to keep the press from discovering the severity of the crash. The official press release stated only that I’d sustained damage to my leg and that my companion—companion, notpartner, notgirlfriend, not evenfriend—was currently under a doctor’s care. It was to preserve Harper’s privacy, Anne insisted. To keep the press from sniffing for more details. The paparazzi had snapped pictures of Harper and me over the year prior, but the family never confirmed she was my girlfriend.We don’t do that,Anne had said, though we both knew they’d have been quick to confirm had I been dating the sort of woman they wanted.
The worddamage, my sister said,covers a multitude of sins.
“Maybe Anne thought it would make me less appealing on the marriage market.” My family has kept so many secrets over the years, over the centuries: infidelities, addictions, deficiencies, madness.
“You make it sound like the eighteen hundreds.”
I shrug.
“Didyouwant to keep it secret?” Amelia asks gently.
A lump rises in my throat. “I don’t know.” My voice sounds unfamiliar, as though a stranger has taken up residence in my vocal cords.
“You don’t have to be ashamed.” Amelia’s voice is tender, but I shake my head.
The doctors and therapists tried to encourage me. They told me stories of former soldiers competing at an elite level in the Invictus Games despite amputations and injuries until I felt like a failure for not having a better outlook. Didn’t they understand it wasn’t the same thing? Those men and women had come by their losses honorably.
Nausea rises in my throat, and in a moment I’m hunched over the toilet again. Amelia doesn’t recoil. She leans closer, rubbing my back.
When I’m done, Amelia puts her hands on my shoulders and pulls me close so that I’m leaning against her, her chin on my forehead. I almost ask if she has children; she seems to know exactly what to do, the way a mother would.
She shifts, straightening one leg out in front of her. She leans around me and takes off her warm boots and socks.
“Look,” she says. “My toes.”
Her foot is very white, her skin almost translucent except for a tiny heart-shaped birthmark just beneath her big toe. I look closer and see a series of nearly invisible scars between her toes.
“Papercuts.” Amelia moves again, sliding out from under me. She lowers the waistband of her leggings, past her underwear, until I can see the top of her thighs. There are more cuts there, longer ones, though just as thin. The lines are neat, perfectly parallel like the pages of a book.
“I started doing it in high school,” she explains, “while I was studying for the SATs. It was the only thing that made the tests bearable.” She chuckles softly, then lifts her shirt and shows me another scar, this one beneath her left breast. It’s a series of slashes over what appears to be a ruined tattoo. I can’t make out what it used to be.
“I did this one just a few months ago,” she says.
“Why are you showing me this?” I ask.
“Because you’re not the only one with a ripped-up body,” she answers.She pulls her shirt down and sits back beside me. She’s so small that I have to lean down so she can rest her chin on my shoulder. I can smell the lavender from her shampoo.
“Can I ask you something?” Amelia asks.
I nod.
“Were you trying to kill yourself?”
I look at my hands, so much larger than hers, than Harper’s, than Anne’s.
“No,” I answer softly. “I was only trying to quiet the voices in my head.”
Amelia circles the wrist of one hand with the thumb and forefinger of the other. “Sometimes I think my mother was actually trying to make the voiceslouder.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you, she took everything she could get her hands on. I thought the real world—you know, without chemical enhancement or whatever—wasn’t enough to hold her interest. Like she needed, more, more, more to make it all worthwhile. Nothing like me. If anything, I wish the world would be less, less, less.”
“Is that why you want to find your mother’s file?” The thought still makes me squeamish. What if Anne or my father came here one day, rifled through Dr. Rush’s notes? “To understand why you’re so different?”
